Ayman al-Zawahiri

Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri (19 June 1951-) was the leader of al-Qaeda from 2011, succeeding Osama Bin Laden. al-Zawahiri was a former physician from Egypt, but he later joined the al-Qaeda jihadist group and became the leader after his boss Osama's assassination in 2011.

Early life
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born on 19 June 1951 in Cairo, Egypt to an upper-middle class family, and he was the brother of Muhammad al-Zawahiri. At the age of fourteen, al-Zawahiri joined the Muslim Brotherhood and made it his goal to put Sayyid Qutb's ideas into motion, establishing sharia law in a worldwide caliphate. al-Zawahiri formed an underground group of secondary school students devoted to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state, and in 1986 he met Osama Bin Laden in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia while studying to become a surgeon.

Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader
He worked as Osama's personal phyisician, and he was involved in the activities of his al-Qaeda jihadist group. In 1981, he planned the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, and he was one of the 1,500 Egyptians of his Egyptian Islamic Jihad group (which had grown from a student group to a terrorist group) that Sadat imprisoned for attempting to assassinate him; he was imprisoned and tortured at the same time as Sadat's murder by Khaled Islambouli. In 1995, EIJ took part in the attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, alienating the country, which had provided a route into Afghanistan. al-Zawahiri befriended Ahmed Khadr while on a Red Crescent mission to Pakistan at the time of the Soviet-Afghan War, and he raised $2,000 from California mosques to help Afghan children who were injured by Soviet Union landmines; he made connections in the United States.

al-Qaeda
In 1998, he merged EIJ with al-Qaeda, and he became its deputy leader with Bin Laden. That same year, he was one of the men responsible for the bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the 2000 USS Cole attack, the 2007 Lal Masjid siege, and the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December. On 1 May 2011, he became the leader of al-Qaeda after Osama Bin Laden's assassination, and he ordeded Muslims to kidnap foreign tourists in their countries. During his tenure as Emir of al-Qaeda, the Syrian Civil War and Arab Spring reached their heights, and the al-Nusra Front and other al-Qaeda-linked groups grew powerful in Syria and Libya. However, the Iraqi branch of the group, the Islamic State of Iraq, later declared itself a caliphate, the "Islamic State", and al-Qaeda was reduced to only around 30,000 fighters while the Islamic State had as many as 200,000 fighters.